British author Natasha Solomons tells Frances Grant how she has been inspired by her own family history and by her home county of Dorset.
The royal wedding might be done and dusted but it has certainly done its bit to rejuvenate that old period piece, the British romance. Those hankering to stay misty-eyed over their muffins could do worse than pick up The Novel In The Viola, the second outing from British writer Natasha Solomons.
Solomons scored a hit with her début novel, Mr Rosenblum's List, about a Austrian-Jewish emigre and his wife, refugees from the Nazis trying to find their feet in a suspicious and sometimes hostile Britain.
The novel ticked all the boxes of a feel-good read: it had humour, a comic hero, good old English eccentricity, snobbery, quaint yokels, chocolate-box countryside, nostalgia and luscious food cooked, of course, with love.
The reviewers raved: "whimsical" and "utterly delightful" wrote every last one. Even the critic who pointed out there was "a disconcerting disconnect" between the comic tone of the novel and the Nazi menace in the background, didn't seem to regard this as a flaw.
"I sat down and wrote the story I wanted to write. It's just how it came out really," says 31-year-old Solomons, when asked how she reacted to all that enthusiasm for her novel's charms. "I do think that books should be pleasurable, I do think part of the role of fiction is to entertain. I don't think that's a dirty word."
Her new novel, however, takes a more serious turn. Again it is the story of an Austrian-Jewish refugee from Hitler, this time a young woman, Elise Landau, who is forced to leave her life of middle-class privilege on a domestic service visa for England - an available, if rather galling, escape route for European Jewish women.
Elise becomes a lowly maid in a remote and grand English country house on the Dorset coast, only to get to grips with an aristocratic English Prince Charming and his ... no, it would spoil the plot to reveal more.
Gone is the comic tone. Hitler's persecution of the Jews casts a longer shadow in this second novel, as Elise worries about the fate of her parents, a celebrated writer and opera singer who fail to make it safely out of Austria. But Solomons says it wasn't her intention to make the darkness of Nazi Europe a focus for either of her books.
"It felt dishonest to write books with a sad note at the end, I wanted to write the immigrant story to show that despite the tragedy, there is a lot of joy."
However, there is a full-blown sense of sadness in The Novel In The Viola, with its double layer of nostalgia: Elise's longing for her sophisticated Viennese home and family, and the passing away of the heyday of the grand English country house.
Solomons describes the book as a "story of the sea, of love lost and found, and of a novel hidden inside a viola". Sources of inspiration included such masterpieces as Rebecca, Remains of the Day and novels such as Jane Eyre.
There's even a Jane and Mr Rochester element to the her story, set on the coast of Dorset. "I call him Mr Dorchester," Solomons says. "I wanted to write about the last days of a great country house but seen through the eyes of an outsider - hundreds of years drawing to a close.
"As it should do," she hastens to add, in case anyone should think she is stuck in a time warp. "Those houses need armies of servants, and [are based on] inequalities unacceptable in the modern world."
As with Mr Rosenblum's List, this latest novel draws, to some extent, on family history. Solomons' grandparents fled Austria for England before World War II. Her grandfather set up a textile factory, a la Mr Rosenblum, and ended up living in Dorset. Her grandmother's sisters, like the separated sisters in The Novel In The Viola, did not meet again for decades after the war. But while there are parallels with reality, she stresses that her stories are still mostly fictional. Unlike Jack Rosenblum, her grandfather did not set out to build a golf course, nor did he go through Jack's hilarious struggles to be the perfect English gentleman.
"I might take a little piece of family history, but then allow the story to find its own truth," she says.
The Dorset countryside itself is another source of inspiration for her work. "I'm in love with it," she says of her home county. The Novel In The Viola is set in the Dorset village of Tyneford, based on the real-life Tyneham, a village requisitioned by the army during the war and never returned to its inhabitants. Public access is occasionally allowed, however, and Solomons, visiting the ghost town as a child, was deeply impressed not only by the sadness of its abandoned state but also by the fact that here was a perfectly preserved piece of the past.
"It's the England of hedgerows, it's a period landscape, there is no intensive farming and the coast is pristine."
But although nostalgia for a bygone era suffuses the novel, there's no doubting Solomons, with her website, blog and tweets, is a thoroughly modern author. The novel has a movie-style trailer on YouTube and a soundtrack, a haunting piece of viola music scored by composer and personal friend Jeff Roma - and downloadable from iTunes.
Solomons and her husband are working on the second draft of the screenplay of Mr Rosenblum's List (the rights have been bought by Film Four and Cowboy Films). And she has started work on a third novel, although won't elaborate.
"I'm not ready to talk about it yet. It's in a really early stage - fragile. If you talk about it too much, you can talk it out of existence." Tread softly, then, all those keen for a new wave of Brit romance.
The Novel In The Viola (Hachette $39.99)
